Sekond Skin – Music, Life, and the Art of Change

It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.
– Miles Davis

Last week I launched a new side project titled ‘Sekond Skin’. As the name suggests, this project is about evolving and changing as an artist and as a person (with the theme of the butterfly being a big part of the debut EP ‘New Beginnings’ as well as the launch event ‘Soulsteps 001: New Beginnings’). It’s also about ‘coming home’ in a way, a return to a part of me that has always been there but that I’m only now making time for. With that in mind I thought it might be a good idea to write a blog about this new project and some of the themes behind it as I feel some of the themes we can all relate to on some level. The first one is ‘change’.

If there is one thing I have learnt about life is that everything changes all the time. I’ve always had an interesting relationship with change. It hasn’t always come naturally to me and it’s something I’ve had to consciously work on at times. I’m not sure why that is, perhaps it’s because I moved around a lot as a kid, perhaps because I’m a sentimental kind of person, or perhaps because no matter how you look at it change is hard. Unfortunately as an artist you are forced to deal with change constantly whether you like it or not. Art and music personify change, with music styles and music scenes constantly changing and evolving. And as an artist, in order to stay relevant, you have to keep on evolving also. ‘Adapt or die’ as the saying goes.

I was pretty lucky as a kid that despite my longing for security and familiarity I also had a father who, as a musician, was constantly into music that was new and fresh (and despite being in his 60’s, still is). He instilled this love of what was ‘cutting edge’ in me from a young age. The end result was that whilst a part of me was constantly seeking security and familiarity, there was also another part of me infatuated with the ‘latest’ sounds. In many ways this balance has kept me going and kept me relevant both as a DJ and a producer, 20 odd years later.

But beyond trends in music my new Sekond Skin project also represents a different kind of change. It also represents a change within me as an individual and a search for something ‘deeper’ than what I’ve done before. That’s not so say that I don’t still love clubs and club music, but rather that there is another part of me that was needing to be expressed also. Club music serves an amazing purpose, uplifting people and bringing people together like nothing else. But as I became a Dad I realised there was so much more complexity to life. As a father and family man I became exposed to the very real experiences of joy, pain, and an incredible selfless love combined with a terrifying fear of loss you feel as a parent. As a man of 40 I had also came to realise that life wasn’t one continuous happy ride but also one filled with pains, losses, and failures. I wanted to write music that reflected those experiences, perhaps not literally, but at the very least emotionally.

Quite ironically despite being an apparent ‘change’, I have always been into deeper music. When I very first started buying records as a 19 year old I would always buy one or two records for the dance floor and one or two for the ‘after-hour’ ‘post-gig’ comedowns. It carried on through my Ministry of Sound discs too, with one of them always being a ‘chilled’ mix, and then later on with my ’Soulsteps’ mixtape series. In some ways you could say it’s an evolution and in some ways you could say it’s a return to something that has always been there. As T.S. Eliot once wrote: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time’.

At the end of the day I have no idea how this project will pan out, how long it will last, if it will find a home, if people will get it, if I’ll lose interest, if it will take me around the world, or if I’ll even be able to buy a burger with the proceedes from it, but what I do know is that it has certainly helped me find an inner peace. Accepting the changes that have gone on inside me – and finding a way to express that through my music – has helped me see that at the end of the day there is no right or wrong in music, there is simply what you feel. And now that I’ve found a peace with this part of me I have also become more accepting of other artists expressing themselves in a similar way, even if I don’t understand their music at first. It’s also re-kindled my love of club music as I no longer look at it as a vehicle for all my inner needs, but accept it simply, for what it is. Change is hard, but without it we can become bitter and unhappy and lose our ability to find an inner peace. As Henry Rollins once said: ‘change is hard, but change is good’.